Page 7

I took a sharp inhale whilst looking into the python’s eyes.

Suddenly, it felt as if the central heating in the room had been cranked up.

I mean, I could lie; I could claim that I didn’t know where everyone had gone, or that I hadn’t noticed people choosing the bathroom over the breakroom. But that wouldn’t be the truth.

‘Yes, yes, we do,’ I confessed, my face grimacing as I did so.

‘I knew it, those little pricks,’ she said, smacking her pen against the desk somewhat triumphantly and throwing herself back on the chair, hands behind her head. ‘You know, Gareth, if they want to act like school children, they’ll be treated as such. You can go.’

In a quiet display of resignation, I rose from the chair without a word and tried to skulk, in the most professional way possible, out of her office.

‘By the way, don’t feel bad that the boys haven’t asked you out yet,’ she reassured me as I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the door to pull it shut behind me.

‘They’re worse than a bunch of teenage girls.

Just… you’re too much like a golden retriever, Gareth.

I need you to be more…’ She made a weird kind of claw with her hand. ‘Rottweiler.’

Geez, I wasn’t just wishing she wouldn’t get the cat now; I was practically rooting for the other guy.

I hurled my fist into the dashboard of my car, and the pain of punching the hardened polyvinyl struck up my arm, which – obviously – only made me angrier, making me punch the dashboard again, as hard as I could this time.

Which, of course, began a very brief self-flagellation cycle of pummelling and pounding before wincing and pouting.

Rinse and repeat. It was when I could feel my knuckles beginning to bruise that I realised I probably wasn’t helping myself feel any better.

I had had my fair share of scowls and intimidating looks for the rest of the day, so I was glad to be leaving the station to avoid any more threatening glares.

Vivian had printed a piece of A4 off and pinned it to the bathroom door, saying that only two people were allowed to be in the boys’ bathroom at once.

She had typed it up in Times New Roman, which I thought was a touch too far in the passive-aggressive scale, although Vivian probably thought default Calibri was too polite.

After driving home, I pulled up outside the house and glanced at my watch.

Four thirty. Fran would be meeting with the young boy and his foster family now, I guessed, and would probably be home within the next hour.

I had to admit, it was nice to know that I would finally be able to have dinner at home today.

I knew the move had been rough on Fran. She had been walking around with her mad-but-I’m-not-going-to-talk-about-it face for the past month.

I had been the one who’d asked her to move, after dropping small hints for the last year that our flat really wasn’t big enough anymore and my promotion to sergeant would come with a nice pay rise.

However, I don’t think the gravity of the situation truly hit her until we arrived.

She had been pretty content and jolly until the moment we pulled up, started unpacking, and met the neighbours, and then I think the penny dropped.

Even though it was only half an hour’s drive away from where we had been, it didn’t feel like home to her.

I strolled over to Mr O’Neill’s house now, and having done a few of these visits before, I crossed my fingers and offered up another prayer to God, hoping not to find another old geezer who had passed away on the loo – just like the last three times on the trot.

I rang the doorbell and waited the standard twenty seconds. Nothing. I repeated the process, still nothing. I pushed open the letterbox, crouched down, and shouted into the house.

‘Mr O’Neill, it’s the police, we’re here checking up on you,’ I hollered. I waited in vain, hoping to hear the sound of an old man come hobbling down the stairs, but of course, not a thing.

I pushed down on the door handle, expecting the usual locked clunk, but instead, I heard the metallic crunch of the bolts, and the door slowly creaked open. Unlocked door? Not a positive sign.

I tiptoed precariously into the house, shutting the door behind me softly, and slipped on my gloves as procedure dictated.

‘Mr O’Neill,’ I called out again as I made my way through the identical house design and structure that Fran and I were getting used to – only this one smelt distinctly of pensioner.

What does that smell like? you ask. Google ‘nonanal’.

Approaching the downstairs toilet door cautiously, like a moment from a horror film, I gently pulled it open and took a quick peek inside the loo. No corpse.

I checked around the downstairs of the house, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Through a process of elimination, I imagined he had probably passed away in his sleep.

I hopped up the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door – but his bed was empty, pristine, in fact, sheets perfectly folded back and made with impeccable placement of the decorative pillows.

Strangely, there were no family photos adorning the walls of his home.

Instead, the walls were hung with framed poems – a rather unusual choice of décor.

As I paused to read a few, I recognised the names – Poe, Tennyson, Cummings – but could not, for the life of me, tell you a single line they had written.

Most of the poetry I knew was from nursery.

I checked his upstairs loo and wet room: no body there, either. I could take a little bit of solace in knowing I had broken that particularly macabre streak.

The last place left to check was his study. I walked in, ready to call Vivian as soon as I glimpsed the sight of a dead body hunched in its chair, but the room was empty – except for a lone piece of paper on the desk. I leaned closer to read it.

Left

Penelope Thornfield (1891–1945)

Sharp Days stretch and stretch, for long everlasting grey.

Lone sunrise burns bitter, galls on flaked tongue.

The birdsong aches and rings a mere discord.

Motherly hand beckons my neck

as if to still the noise for me,

A last yearning for silence,

All at once.

I had investigated a few disappearances and suicides in my time.

Never once had I seen a poem left as some kind of note by the victim.

Scanning the small study again, my eyes landed on the array of bookshelves fitted into every wall.

It was probably a poetry nut’s wet dream, each anthology and collection lined up on each shelf amazingly neatly.

I didn’t need to take a book off to see the obvious care; no dog-eared pages or thick layers of dust to be seen.

Someone who treated their books with such reverence wouldn’t be the type to rip a page out for a suicide note, surely?

I picked up the torn extract again; it looked like someone had tried to be careful but, in the end, had given in to urgency, with obvious jagged edges and some paper residue surrounding the poem’s edges.

I called Vivian.

‘Where was he? I was wagering on the stairs,’ she said.

Most people normally said hello.

‘Actually, there’s no sign of him. The door was unlocked, house is in pristine condition, no sign of any kind of foul play. The only thing here of any kind of significance is a poem.’ I read it out to her, and I could hear a few moments of irritated silence on the other end of the line.

‘And…?’ she replied.

That woman was truly something else.

‘So, I’m thinking something’s clearly not right here. We need to get forensics in, see if there’s anything we can find, maybe put out a request to the search advisors and see what they find.’

‘Donoghue, the old man probably just dawdled off in a dementia-fuelled haze or decided to call it quits early. We’ll find his body washed up somewhere in a few days. I’ve seen plenty of these, hundreds. They’re all just the same.’

‘But it doesn’t make any kind of sense. I?—’

‘We, as a department, don’t have the resources to probe into some old man’s suicide,’ Vivian cut in callously.

‘And I, as a DI do not have the time for the paperwork to approve such a lengthy investigation.’ She paused briefly before adding, ‘I’m emailing you a revised draft of the Lock case for the CPS. Have a look at it tonight.’

She hung up.

I pushed the phone back into my pocket with an exasperated sigh. I couldn’t help but feel like the Lock case was being prioritised just for the significant amount of attention it was getting in the press. But something wasn’t right here.

I did one more scan around the house, this time careful not to disturb or touch anything.

Three quarters of suicides took place at home, and the other twenty-five per cent were often done in public: high-traffic areas like bridges or train tracks.

Very rarely did anyone try to hide their suicide, and if so, why?

Humans weren’t like cats, sauntering off to die.

Elderly person suicide was more common than you’d expect, but usually, it was through overdoses or self-imposed starvation – not a vanishing act.

With one gloved hand, I pulled open the fridge door in Mr O’Neill’s spotless kitchen and saw the spotlessness didn’t extend to his fridge.

It was a mess in there: a half-drunk carton of milk, a selection of meats, and an array of fresh vegetables that hadn’t even begun to go off.

My first thought: why buy groceries if you’re planning to kill yourself?

My second thought: ginger, garlic, garam masala…

Mr O’Neill had all the ingredients for a tikka masala.